Okay, I have had a little over a week with the Palm Lifedrive. Following are my observations:

First impressions...

1. The device is easy to use, powerful and flexible.

2. I love the fact that I can carry all of my Word, Powerpoint and Excell documents with me in Native format, and open them with DTG.

3. Multimedia capabilities are very powerful. I have dowloaded several full length movies to the device and can view them with the built in media player. The Lifedrive Manager provides the option of converting the movie to a format best viewable on the device or copying it in its original format. A third party open source media player with a ton of video translators, makes viewing the video transparent, regardless of format.

4. The screen, (320X480), is crisp, bright and responsive.

5. Speed is quite acceptable, despite the fact that the device loads most software from its 4GB hard drive on execution. This has been a complaint of some, that the device is too slow. I have found that other than a slight delay in loading application, that the device's speed is quite acceptable. Third party applications like SharkCache, enable you to speed up this function as well.

6. Palms implementation of bluetooth connectivity to cell phones remains superior. I was able to connect to my new Motorola RAZR and send and recieve SMS messages OUT OF THE BOX. The Pocket PC does not even recognize the RAZR by model and has limited capability (I have never been able to find even a third party SMS client for the Pocket PC that would work with the RAZR V3).

I have run into a few things I dont like.

1. I have never been able to connect with a Linksys 802.11b Wireless Router with any of my Palms. Not sure why this is. An update to the Lifedrive software suppossedly made it more compatable with Linksys newer 802.11G routers, but it still fails to connect to the older router.

2.The included Blazer web browser chokes on some large or complex websites, including ISOU.

3. I dont really like (understand) the filesystem yet. For example, I am not sure which new programs can be installed directly to my 1GB memory card or to the hard drive. I am still playing with this.

Other than that, the thing ROCKS, and I am not even looking back at my brief flirtation with the Devil.

If you are looking for a mobile device to replace your notebook for short trips and day to day use, you may find it in the Lifedrive.

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